Weekend picks for book lovers

Jan. 4, 2014
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'Inside the Dream Palace' is a weekend book pick.

by USA TODAY, USATODAY

by USA TODAY, USATODAY

What should you read this weekend? USA TODAY's picks include a history of New York's legendary Chelsea Hotel, and Ruth Rendell's latest mystery.

Inside the Dream Palace: The Life and Times of New York's Legendary Chelsea Hotel by Sherill Tippins; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 445 pp.; non-fiction

The Chelsea Hotel, an imposing, picturesque, red-brick edifice, all but dominates Manhattan's West 23rd Street. For generations it served as mecca, work station, rehearsal space and refuge for artists, writers, musicians, dancers, actors and many others who weren't any of those things, but yearned to be.

So many legendary cultural figures have passed through the Chelsea's doors since the 1880s when its identity as a utopian experiment was first established that it has become de rigueur for visitors to invoke the timeworn wish, "If these walls could talk ‚?¶"

More than the history of a building, Inside the Dream Palace also serves as a retrospective of bohemian America's seismic shifts over the decades, beginning with such late 19th-century literary lions as novelist William Dean Howells.

Tippins covers all the notorious romances and tragedies; the former including the tryst between Janis Joplin and Leonard Cohen, immortalized in Cohen's song, "Chelsea Hotel #2." The tragedies included the fatal stabbing of Nancy Spungen in 1978 by punk-rock drummer Sid Vicious.

Investigator Arkady Renko puts himself on the case after an investigative journalist named Tatiana Petrovna ‚?? inspired by the real-life Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya ‚?? dies after falling from the balcony of her abandoned apartment building.